A former Marxist guerrilla leader whose party reportedly has ties to Venezuela’s socialist government and drug traffickers is poised to be El Salvador’s next president.

Elliott Abrams, deputy national security adviser in the George W. Bush administration and assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs under Ronald Reagan, said in an interview that Sanchez Ceren is from the “hardest-line elements of the FMLN.” He said Jose Luis Merino, Sanchez Ceren’s “right-hand man,” has ties to narcotics traffickers in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

While there is still a chance that Quijano could collect votes from the supporters of other candidates in the initial elections, Abrams said it would not be easy.

“It’s going to be very difficult,” he said. “The drug traffickers are in a position to spend a lot of money on the runoff.”

Hope, dope and change.

The left needs financing and the Latin American left has figured out that taking over the drug trade makes it virtually invulnerable.

Noriega said Sanchez Ceren is an “anti-U.S. radical who committed barbaric acts against his own people during a bloody civil war.”

He also led a FMLN march four days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks where participants blamed U.S. policies for the al Qaeda operation and burned an American flag.

Among other atrocities that the FMLN was responsible for was the Zona Rosa massacre which killed four US Marines and several other Americans.

On that June 19, 1985, night, the four U.S. Marines sat at an outdoor table at a Chili’s restaurant in the Zona Rosa. All four were unarmed, enjoying down time from guard duty at the U.S. Embassy and wearing civilian clothes.

The seven assailants who arrived in a white pick-up truck were from the Revolutionary Party of Central American Workers, one of the five FMLN factions. Weeks earlier, rebel leaders pronounced that all U.S. military personnel in El Salvador “were legitimate targets in the war,” the faction’s then-leader, Francisco Jovel, said in an interview.

In a voice choking with emotion, President Reagan pledged today to bring to justice the killers of four American marines killed Wednesday in San Salvador.

”They say the men who murdered these sons of America escaped, disappeared into the city streets, but I pledge to you today they will not evade justice on earth any more than they can escape the judgment of God,” Mr. Reagan said. ”We and the Salvadoran leaders will move any mountain and ford any river to find the jackals and bring them and their colleagues in terror to justice.”

Mr. Reagan, and his wife, Nancy, flew to Andrews Air Force Base for the brief ceremony that began as the coffins were carried from an Air Force transport plane and ended when each coffin was loaded into a hearse and driven away.

But that was back when we had an American president. These days we have our own Ceren in power who has more in common ideologically with the killers of those Marines than with the Marines themselves. Benghazi was just one of many reminders of that.

Galeas and Ayala are fully engaged in detailing assassinations by the FMLN of 1,200-1,500 persons between 1986 and 1990. For the better part of a year, they have spoken with family survivors, met with assassins and exhumed graves holding 20 or 30 or more skeletal remains.

“One of the favorite interrogation techniques was to bludgeon presumed enemy spies with wooden clubs,” Mr. Galeas recounted. “They first assaulted their arms and legs, brutally breaking them in futile attempts to get them to talk – futile because they had nothing to confess. Eventually, they realized there was nothing forthcoming and they turned their clubs on the victims’ skulls, beating them until they succumbed.”

These were not ordinary murders; they were committed by guerrillas against other guerrillas on the orders of the commanding general in the San Vicente region, known in the FMLN as El Frente Para Central (The Auxiliary Central Front). What’s more, virtually all the murders were based on unproven hearsay allegations that the victims were Salvadoran military agents trying to undermine the terrorist cause.

The commanding general who approved every assassination, with the alias “Leonel Gonzalez,” was none other than Salvador Sanchez Ceren, vice presidential candidate of the FMLN in the country’s March presidential elections. Sanchez Ceren has long been a top FMLN leader and is considered one of the most orthodox hard leftists in the organization